Mythologies are dead, they have always been. But even as dead corpses, they’ve been used as political strategies to manipulate fiction and facts. Fictional narratives have defined culture, its historicity, its legacy. Drama. Goosebumps visible in our skin. Chills. The amplification of the voice. The soundtrack of the film. Attitudes change. Behavioral patterns change, adapting to new forms of recognition. The stream of our social media accounts translated by ignorant algorithms. Liquid and opaque forms of identity. The movements of the body. The most superficial of all gestures can never be taken lightly, even if it tries hard to be disguised with bright colors, with feathers and fumes.

A year ago, exactly on the same date of the opening of this exhibition at BASEMENT ROMA, I arrived in Los Angeles. I had never been to the city, and to me L.A. represented the geographical point of the production of what is called the spectacle, a sort of dead-end or end point of Western civilization. The amount of fiction written for films, tv and all sorts of shows that come from there, generates an overproduction of narratives that intend to alienate the spectator while mixing and re-creating personal and historical moments. The entertainment business is a form of capitalist production that alters our perspective on the events happening around us. For example, the way politics is represented in fiction is, in many cases, deprived of ethics. And it continues to do so through an ever growing network of mythologies.

If we think carefully on the process of how narratives and mythologies travelled from Ancient Greece, re-interpreted through Rome, we can analyze the process of how culture in the West has been produced, how philosophy, fiction writing, poetry, music and the visual arts, have transformed themselves as part of a capitalist machine. The mass production of images, the representation of the human body, the representation of nature on Western culture changed quite drastically since early capitalism. Under forms of appropriation and colonization, our interactions within the available communication systems are surveilled and monitored. Our exchanges are now translated into big data. And data has now surpassed oil as the most valuable resource in the world, and we are all contributing with different types of content.

The goal of fiction today is to pretend that there is a continuation, that the grand narrative never dies. Season after season of endless stories that colonize our lives. Our brains have been programmed to accept Trump as president via Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Our imagination was colonized so we could accept that type of person as a political figure.

The title I gave this exhibition, Sequel, refers to the disbelief of Western traditions of narrative and representation in the moment we’re living. But I need to ask myself and you: how can our imagination resist? How can we stop our imagination from being colonized by these myths? What can art and thought do facing these forms of fictional politics? What is left for us to write? Are we supposed to resist this endless present of small narratives that hide the big narratives of capital? Should we think about an ecology of production of data, an ecology of immaterial labour?

In her book, The Responsibility of Fiction Writing in Neoliberal Capitalist Societies (Duvida Press, 2014), writer Leonora Jones talks about the necessity of awareness in the growing use of text in our communications, specially in the interactions in social media, and how data is used, transformed and profited by capital, as it manifests the exposure and altered states of subjectivity produced within a neoliberal post-capitalist society. Along with the growing abstraction of value and human interactions, new forms of passivity, of spectatorship and consumption require a response to new models of action and community. The apparent fluidity of circulation and distribution are represented by a materiality that is not fixed. Jones asks: “How can we represent a state of constant transformation, if it changes shape at any moment, like an ecosystem needs to adapt and mutate to the surrounding environment?” And she continues: “We should act in a form of conscious resistance, not as passive spectators”. Jones mentions Naomi Klein’s NO LOGO (Picador, 1999) and her take on Milton Friedman, who Klein claims to be “the architect of the global corporate takeover”. Jones underlines her idea with the fact that Klein illustrates this chapter of her text with footage of two members of the activist group Bionic Baking Brigade, who threw a pie at Milton Friedman, when the economist was leaving a corporate conference in San Francisco in 1998. (PB)

Indipendenza is pleased to announce LAVORO, the exhibition of Karl Holmqvist and Klara Liden.
The show has been purposely made to fit into the rooms of the turn of the century apartment in
Rome where Indipendenza has its exhibition space.
The title may refer to the artists having worked on-site to combine a selection of videos, prints,
paintings, sculptures and wall texts.
There is a room-sized installation made from discarded cardboard in which is shown the video NHITE WOICE from 2015 where the two artists are seen attempting to do a synchronised set of dance
moves as a comment on the terms of collaboration and the need for individual artistic expression.
Other parts include a never-ending spoken word video and a hidden seating area for reading, or else
a place where one can simply catch glimpses of Roman city life as seen through the open balcony
door.
The themes of interaction and isolation, the public and private and of hiding and seeking linger in
the rooms of the exhibition space where numerous traces of previous occupants are still also left to
be seen.
Karl Holmqvist (born 1964, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. Recent Solo exhibitions include TUFF
LOVE at the Power Station in Dallas and READ DEAR at the Camden Arts Centre in London, both 2016.
He has participated in both the 50th and the 54th Venice Biennials in 2003 and 2011 respectively as
well as numerous times in the Performa arts festival in New York.
Klara Liden (born 1979, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Batte ment
Battu at Wiels in Brussels in 2016, Cafe Autostrada at Museion in Bolzano in 2013 and Bodies
of Society at the New Museum in New York in 2012. She received the Carnegie Art Award in 2012
and a special mention for the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011.

The ambiguous relationship between appropriation, authorship and ready-made object and the equally delicate one between language, personal narrative and collective history: these are the themes that Claire Fontaine, Fabian Herkenhoener, Martin Soto Climent and Tris Vonna-Michell will examine in the exhibition ’t twoninethree in-residence at Luciana Brito Galeria’.

In Claire Fontaine’s works, the denial of authorship and originality is asserted through the appropriation and re-elaboration of symbols, objects and images of the contemporary art culture with the aim of investigating the consequences of Capitalism on our society. Surely one of the most iconic artworks by the Paris-based collective, Via Tribunali 293, 22.03.2010 is the copy of the keys of the historical Neapolitan venue of the gallery: the decision to exhibit these ordinary objects in a different gallery and potentially available to anyone, translates the intention of using art as a device for the analysis and critique of socio-political issues such as the concept of private property. In God They Trust it’s a U.S. quarter that has been cut in half and outfitted with a folding box cutter blade. Not detectable by security controls it becomes a weapon that, despite being simple and small, feeds a paranoid fear of a potentially omnipresent violence. Written text is another crucial element in the artistic practice of Claire Fontaine who, coherently with her social critique, presents the text May Our Enemies Not Prosper written on the occasion of another exhibition, held in another gallery in 2016, revolving around the themes of violence and the refugee crisis.

Authorship is also a key word in the practice of Fabian Herkenhoener, who decided to confront it through the literary technique of the ‘cut-up’. Proposed for the first time by poet Tristan Tzara during a surrealist rally in the 1920s, it consists in the deconstruction of a primary text using the random cutting up of words and phrases to form new sentences with a new logical sense. Herkenhoener’s interpretation of this technique leads to a ‘processing text’, an expression he invented to explain his artistic research in which a random language is enriched by a biographical dimension (since he is the author of some of the original texts) and by a visual one where words and phrases take geometric forms or invade the canvas as grid-like structures that are meant to emphasize the mental and emotional dynamics that generated them. On the occasion of this show, Herkenhoener will create wall-based works using texts he has been writing during a trip in California and Mexico on his way to São Paulo.

In his surrealist-like creations Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent exploits the transformative potential of everyday objects and found materials to create new poetic forms in which these elements assume a new and deeper symbolic role. Through conceptual artistic strategies such as appropriation and juxtaposition, these objects are gently reassembled into collages, installations and sculptures that, in their simplicity, appear ready-made. Soto Climent's amazing skill of interpreting the site-specific and conferring softness and sensuality to objects through minimal intervention takes shape through four wall-based works where old clothes become pictorial tools and act as colors, lines and geometries on the surface of the canvases. New ways of interacting with reality to suggest new perspectives.

Though many of the works by Tris Vonna-Michell have clearly autobiographical traits, these are not employed in order to authenticate or legitimize the wroks but rather assist in anchoring the multifaceted socio-political and cultural-historical constellations in which certain imagineries can be produced. A consummate storyteller, Vonna-Michell elaborately constructs tales that include historical research and social observation filtered through personal adecdotes. His works are always context-specific and are constantly modified through slights interventions to create what he terms a ‘narrative of the form’. The version of Registers specifically created for this exhibition consists of an animated sequence of slides taken during a trip to Japan in 2008. All slides were taken in transient spaces such as underpasses, viaducts, stations, docks and are re-assembled into an anachronistic narrative which forces the viewer to move constantly backwards and forwards in time. The unmistakable, fast-moving voice of the artist accompanies the sequence of images along with a soundtrack which is the result of a montage of musical compositions by Antwerp-based artist/musician Jan Matthé.

Giuseppe Gabellone
curated by Francesco Stocchi
Vernissage May 4, 6.30pm
Via Fontanella Borghese 56b, Roma
5 May – 15 October 2017
11am – 6pm (closed on Tuesday)
Free admission
Fondazione Memmo presents Giuseppe Gabellone’s first solo exhibition in Rome, curated by
Francesco Stocchi, thereby confirming its mission to promote contemporary art through sitespecific
creations and new works.
Characterized by a strong formal rigour and a critical approach to traditional artistic media
such as photography and sculpture, Gabellone’s work is particularly sensitive to the
surrounding exhibition space and its various sensory aspects. The artist’s approach is a
continuation of the tradition of great sculpture’s innovators, such as Medardo Rosso, Umberto
Boccioni and Arturo Martini: by emphasizing the dynamic relationships between light and
shadow, full and empty, the artist expands the concept of sculpture to other techniques and
practices, addressing the central issues that arise from his activity, especially in those areas
where the mediated experience attempts to replace direct perception.
The exhibition Giuseppe Gabellone is characterized by a marked sensitivity to the context and
conditions in which the artist’s works are exhibited, and he creates them in a close dialogue
with the setting, intervening to produce an organic succession of works that is nevertheless
always coherent and unified. Each work seems to contain the preceding one, and each new
series of works raises questions that are at the foundation of the next creation, gradually
evolving over the period during which the exhibition is held. The exhibition is thus perceived as
an experience for generating new ideas rather than as the ultimate goal of the artist’s
development, so that references to past exhibitions and anticipations with those in the future
become a key element for viewing Gabellone’s aesthetic approach in its entirety and for
understanding his work in a coherent way.
With a strong visual impact, the interventions of Gabellone intended for Fondazione Memmo’s
spaces break down traditional separations between the natural and artificial, the interior and
exterior space. This is a synthesis of opposites in which the works do not seem to depend on
the location so much as they respond to it, emphasizing the ephemeral aspects of the
exhibition, such as its duration, its effects on the transformations of matter, and fragile
equilibria between shadow and light.
The visitor is initially disoriented by being in the middle of a rather barren space that is
illuminated in a minimal way. It is a container that is modelled “by the force of reduction” and
that has become an essential content, since this emptiness intensifies the relationship between
the work, the surrounding space and the visitor.
Each of the works on display, realized with the use of various different techniques and media,
reveals a progressive deconstruction of the form and function of the language of artistic
expression, emphasizing the necessity of sensory experience as a vehicle for intellectual
experience.
Giuseppe Gabellone (b. 1973, Brindisi) lives and works in Paris. His solo exhibitions include
those held at: GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2013); Domaine
de Kerguéhennec, Bignan (2008); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2002) and
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2000). His most important group exhibitions
have been held at: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001);
Museu Serralves, Porto (2001); S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst, Ghent (2000);
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (1996); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli
(2000) and Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (1995). He has also exhibited in numerous
international exhibitions including: the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003); the Lyon Biennale
(2003); Documenta Kassel (2002); the Biennale of Sydney (1998) and the Santa Fe Biennial
(1997).
Francesco Stocchi (b. 1975, Rome) is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He is the curator of the programme of the
Fondazione Carriero Foundation (Milan) and he writes regularly about art and visual culture. He
currently lives in Amsterdam.
The Fondazione Memmo - Arte Contemporanea is housed in the stables of Palazzo Ruspoli,
a sixteenth-century building in the centre of Rome. In 2012 the foundation launched an
exhibition programme dedicated to the contemporary art scene. By organizing and producing
exhibitions, performances, residencies, talks, teaching workshops and publications, the
intention of the foundation is to contribute to the development of a local cultural fabric, but
with a global vision, promoting interactions between the artists and the city of Rome. The
exhibitions that have been held hitherto are: Conversation Piece | Part III (2016); Camille
Henrot, Monday (2016); Conversation Piece | Part 2 (2016); Conversation Piece | Part 1
(2015); Shannon Ebner, AutoBody Collision (2014); Sterling Ruby, CHRON II (2013); Sara
VanDerBeek (2012).
Educational workshops (4-11 years)
The exhibition will be accompanied by educational activities for children 4 to 11 years - from
May until October - curated by Daphne Ilari.
The works of Giuseppe Gabellone have the imaginative potential to light up children's eyes and
imagination through the different languages of contemporary art.
By reservation only: Daphne Ilari (daphne.ilari@gmail.com)
The proceeds will be donated to the Fondazione Theodora Onlus (a nonprofit organization).
Info
artecontemporanea@fondazionememmo.it
www.fondazionememmo.it
Via Fontanella Borghese 56b, Rome
Tel +39 06.68136598
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Opening hours
11am – 6pm (closed on Tuesdays)
Press office
Silvia Macchetto | silvia@silviamacchetto.com | T + 39 3383429581

Art must become part of life, but as life is alienated, we also need to commit to liberating and disalienating life. Piero Gilardi
With over 60 works, from the famous Nature-carpets to the interactive installations and through to the Living Art Park of Turin, along with important pieces exhibited for the first time in years or reconstructed for the occasion, the exhibition reviews the career of a master for whom art and life are identified with and become militant commitment, starting out from that as an ecologist.
Fifty-year career in which art, criticism and politics are intertwined
From the complex relationship between man and nature, it investigates the era of consumerism and the use of new technologies in a presentation tackling and exploring themes such as ecology, the relational nature of art and social and political commitment.It is divided into four sections, each of which includes both works and archive materials (sketches, texts, original photographs, small works) allowing a comprehensive overview of the artists thinking and poetic.